Amazon to double investment in Prime Video

Bezos said the company's video-streaming platform is doing the best in India as compared to any other country

The stars were out at the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai as Amazon chief executive officer Jeff Bezos addressed a celebrity-studded audience at an Amazon Prime Video blue-carpet event on Thursday.

In a 30-minute fireside chat with Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan and film director Zoya Akhtar, Bezos said that the company’s video streaming platform is doing the best in India as compared to any other country in the world.

“Prime Video is doing well all over the world, but nowhere it’s doing better than India. We have just made a decision to double down on our Prime Video investments in India,” said the CEO of the global e-commerce giant at the event that was attended by a slew of celebrities such as Vidya Balan, A R Rahman, Kamal Haasan, Vishal Bhardwaj and Farhan Akhtar. 

The chat was dotted with several humorous moments, with Khan making Bezos say a dialogue from his famous Bollywood film remake — Don. The CEO pulled off a smooth “Bezos ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi namumkin hai” liner in Hindi. 

Amazon India head Amit Agarwal was also present at the blue-carpet event and called it a scintillating chat between Bezos and Khan. He said in a tweet that the company was very proud of what it had achieved in such a short span in India. 

The video streaming platform had earlier revealed plans to serve one Indian original per month to customers this year. It had also announced a list of 24 titles that will be released on its platform in India in January. That includes originals such as Star Trek: Picard and Kabir Khan's The Forgotten Army, both out January 24, in addition to The Angry Birds Movie 2. The platform has already garnered traction with original content such as Made in Heaven and The Family Man in 2019.

With over 600 million broadband users in India, global majors such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar are fighting it out to grab a pie of the fast-growing Indian streaming video market.  

According to a Ficci report, the sector is expected to reach Rs 2,400 crore by 2021. For a deeper penetration, streaming video companies are offering content in several Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu and Bengali.